


paradise in a gold watch

by checkpoints



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29319966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/checkpoints/pseuds/checkpoints
Summary: Funny, funny, always so funny how that worked. But the actions were made, and the choices were chosen, and for all that she feared, she could never take a single shred back. They were gone, and gone, and gone.
Relationships: Jim Holden & Clarissa Mao
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	paradise in a gold watch

**Author's Note:**

> holding up one single peach and whispering "I Just Think She's Neat" to no one in particular

It began with a call.

Really, she’d like to say it began with Julie; with their father, and the lie that was Melba Koh, and the endocrine enhancement mods stealing away a little bit more of her with every new day, and…but, it never worked like that. Change happened like the slow fade from late to night; blue to black; you saw it in pieces, eyes closed and then not to find everything changed, and, it began with a call.

 _You need a break, Peaches. Let Naomi tag in for a bit,_ Amos had said, voice crackling through their private channel only after the airlock was closed and repressurized, and then said nothing else. The call ended like that was that, because that was that, and so neither did she. Clarissa knew her limits, but ever since the rocks fell, Amos watched them closer. Unneeded, but appreciated; she sighed a little animal sigh of satisfaction into the silence of the ship.

She took that break.

Hours spent tucked away in her hastily assigned quarters, avoiding it for fear of having to see that look of shock on James Holden’s face, and Amos thankfully said nothing. Hours more spent in the relative silence of maintenance work on the Rocinante’s hull, her mind drifting onto the idea of having to look Naomi Nagata in the eyes after nearly crushing her throat with a stolen mech suit all that time ago, and though Amos watched her closer, he still said nothing. It was only after the fear of being alone returned to remind her that she couldn’t stop fucking _thinking_ for the first time since they climbed ten floors out of the ground to trail murder like momentum on their path to Luna that Amos spoke up.

They were on the float, and Martian vac suits thankfully came equipped with both mag boots _and_ mag gloves, so there was never really any danger, but for the briefest of moments and just long enough, Clarissa let her eyes drift up to the void of space. A rookie mistake, really.

Her entire sense of equilibrium stuttered, and crumpled under the force of truth it contained, dotted through the empty like the stars themselves; lives, her own and others, being left behind for dead weight. She stumbled just enough to be noticed, and Amos sent her back inside to fetch a tool they both knew he didn’t forget. They both knew exactly what happened. And so, she went along.

Weeks on the ship a lifetime ago confined to quarters as a prisoner, and only now was she confronted with the possibility of having to speak to the people she had once tried to kill. Funny.

So thoroughly divorced from that mission for vengeance, the Rocinante may as well have been the most terrifying place left in the galaxy. It was a promise for more, or for nothing. For home, or for death. Being inside without Amos was nearly as suffocating as the vacuum, whole decks of solitude tricking her into endless feedback loops of tribes and disaster.

Funny how that worked. Choices never felt so fragile until those eternities between the before and the after, when choosing still had the chance to mean nothing at all.

Time had turned the terror of waiting almost worse than the fear of knowing.

Before — _before_ before, with Julie, and their father, and the Earth still intact — the forever of middles never quite bothered the same. The her that she used to be might have called it an inconvenience, but in the now, in the not-quite-yet-after, the only thing it brought her was fear. She was so many broken pieces of what could not ever have been whole, offering the horrors that hid in the dark of the middle more handholds to pull her down by the day. Broken to pieces so small that anyone who cared to look would see straight through her. Amos did. Does.

She used to think James Holden might too, but like so much else, she was wrong about that. Trapped in eye contact in the Behemoth’s jail cells, and the only thing he cared to ask was, _Hey, I’m Jim, what’re you in for,_ as she fell suddenly apart at the seams.

Funny, funny, always so funny how that worked. But the actions were made, and the choices were chosen, and for all that she feared, she could never take a single shred back. They were gone, and gone, and gone.

In the end, free reign of the ship felt somehow more frightening than being strapped to a chair deep beneath the earth. Somehow more horrifying than the feeling of her veins filled with so many chemical blockers that she doubted they still contained blood. Somehow more crushing than being unable to remember the feeling of her own humanity. Her body carried her against her will to the galley.

The first thing she noticed was the plants.

The first thing she noticed was the sterility of it all; everything too-plain, and too-clean, and too-MCRN-White-And-Gray. But, when her eyes peeled away with the faintest recognition that she was in the right place, the first thing she noticed after that was the plants.

Aeroponics circles on the walls dotted the space between cabinets. Panels filled with plants too foggy to name lived beneath the frosted glass dining table covering. It wasn’t Earth, but it _was_ the first bit of green she had been near ever since the before. Julie, and her father’s flowers, and that tree that she always hoped would outlive them all. The Pit had a garden, but it was never the same. Synthetic replicas wrapped in the dead shells of bare branches and yellowed leaves.

The Rocinante’s galley, however, froze Clarissa to the core. Flawless life-filled green broken only at the edges by the blinding white backlights.

 _Our father is a damaged man,_ she heard without wanting the sound of Julie’s voice. Too many plants, too easy to remember, and, _you’ll never be good enough for him._

Funny, the things she used to convince herself mattered. Image, and appearances, and intricate webs of lies, like if they only fooled enough disparate pieces of themselves, their family might finally begin to feel real. All that life, all that green, trapped in a past too dead to deserve it. Their father was a monster, and she nearly let herself become the same, and Julie was right to have left.

What happened then was mostly involuntary. Action caught somewhere between absent curiosity and desire. Clarissa reached out for the aeroponics circle on the far wall, the length of the galley somehow crossed before she realized.

She reached out, and she did not touch, but she shut her eyes, and her ears, and her mind to the rest of the world, and, _I have killed, but I’m not a killer, because a killer is a monster, and_ —

 _But you are,_ her father’s voice cut crystal clear through the dark. A scoff and the faded wet blurs of memory, and, _a monster, that is. Monsters don’t get to have families; I should know, after all._

She might have said something in response. Her voice might have cracked. Maybe she imagined it? Maybe her voice never escaped at all? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure, and her eyes snapped open. The voice was not real, and she did not hear it just like she did not give attention to the frantic beating of her heart against the backs of her ribs.

A third voice — real, and there, even through the electronic buzz of distortion and compression — crackled to life through the whole of the galley, then.

“Peaches,” it called. “You there?”

Clarissa swallowed past the knot in her throat and answered, “Yes,” with all the false conviction of someone who truly believed it. “Yeah.”

“Good,” Amos continued, like he was planning to answer that way regardless of the answer. “Naomi says we’ve still got some leftover lasagna sittin’ around somewhere. You need to eat. Better it goes to you than goes to waste.”

Mercifully, the call cut out before she could respond. She appreciated the fussing more than she knew how to put into words, but that she did never ceased to bring the truth of her situation into startling clarity. Amos cared, but her future still belonged to the whims of strangers she had hurt too many times to deserve a second chance.

She fished out a fork and what was left of the lasagna, paid no mind to the spinach, and carrots, and soy crumble layered within, and shoved the whole tray into the microwave.

By her third bite, Clarissa was so far lost in the depths of thought that even the deafening silence of the ship no longer reached her. She thought, in her solitude, about how much she used to enjoy being alone.

There was a calm sort of peace to the quiet of it. Or, at least, there used to be. Space for her head to be loud as it could without so much as a hint of disturbed still. No boundaries, no barriers, no intricate craftwork of years-rehearsed lies meant to guide her through the jagged maze of social convention and harm guised in care. Nothing but her heart, and her mind, and her self.

But, then quiet was fear. Then quiet was hunger. Then it was tension. The moments before death — and there was _so_ much death — pulled taut as they could go in preparation for the snap. Hubris, and realization, and revelation, and resolve. And, then, once again, the depths of The Pit turned the quiet to fear.

She was scared every day of her life that the quiet returned. She was scared all the way down to the roil of sick in her stomach and the ice-cold tremble in her limbs; scared down to every last far-flung corner of self that existed. She was scared, so scared that most days nausea was more default than development, but all she could do anymore was try not to think about the fact that even the fear itself was changed.

Where before that fear had been desperation and clinging to the only family she ever knew, time had warped it into a pleading, marrow-deep need for _more._ She knew what else existed, and she had felt it firsthand every second of every minute of every hour trapped with Amos in the rubble and the death of the Earth, and now, on the precipice of something new, all she could do was try not to think about it.

Tribes shrank and they didn’t. She stabbed another piece of lasagna with her fork, and she tried not to think about it.

The last bite of her meal didn’t release Clarissa from the silence, but the coffeemaker did. She forgot for a moment the lack of gravity, and at the first distant beep, whipped herself around in her seat almost fast enough to go flying off into the bulkheads. Her magboots were still activated though, and so instead they served to anchor her in place; to tug her back and float her gently down to the floor, where she pretended she was very much not seconds from convulsing and vomiting up enough fear to flood the entire deck. She scrambled back to her feet, and she froze like a deer in headlights as she tried not to think about it.

James Holden simply watched her, ghostly pale skin, patchy beard and all. Less patchy, these days.

That strange and intense look of focus was evidently the only expression he cared to wear, and he took a slow sip from his rebranded-MCRN coffee mug.

To her side, the lasagna tray and her fork both floated gently away from the table toward the opposite end of the room. She made no effort to stop them, unable to move beneath the force of James Holden’s gaze. Unable to move even when it released her to follow the weightless path of her dinnerware through the air.

A beat passed. Another, and another, and another, and still more, faster and faster until they outpaced even the frantic beating of her heart. James Holden, one of the two most terrifying figures left in Clarissa’s life, plucked both the tray and fork from their paths. He asked, “Was that Alex’s lasagna?”

The fear roared hotter and hotter until it charred Clarissa’s insides to the bleeding edge between life and death.

Was there ever, she wondered, anything like them? Was that just what the galaxy was, so wholly free of her father’s touch? Killing each other and defying that very death to end up back together on the same side of a new fight?

Amos told her once, inasmuch as Amos ever told her anything about his past, that the entire Rocinante crew had tried to kill each other at some point or another. If nothing else, it held true for the two of them. Shotgun pointed at her chest as she sat strapped to a chair with an angry pastor standing watch; _I’ve known people like her, keeping her around is not gonna work,_ to whatever they were now. But, it was hard to see truth in what he’d said. Harder still to see it as the same as this _thing_ she had caused.

She watched as James Holden studied the empty tray, brows drawn down somehow further in his concentration. The wonder over what sort of punishment she brought on herself in the act of eating the last of a dead man’s cooking only came when Holden tucked both objects safely away into a cabinet and took another sip of his coffee. She did not let herself follow that thought to the places it threatened to lead, just like she did not allow herself to look away from the place that held the final, emptied pieces of Alex Kamal.

She hadn’t killed him, but she couldn’t help feeling like it was her fault anyway. Death was her introduction to this family, and so too her reunion. For all she tried, and for all she feared, the only way her tribe seemed to grow was by wading through the muck of dead bodies stained with her presence even before her first touch. The Slow Zone, The Pit, and now this.

Now this.

 _I have killed,_ she thought. It rarely did her any good in the face of truth, but she thought the words all the same. _But I’m not a killer._

Months spent convincing herself that killers were monsters, and that monsters weren’t afraid, even despite how often truth poked holes in the thought. Surely, it whispered to the depths of her mind, monsters came in different shapes. Surely, even the fearful were monstrous when the bodies stacked up high enough. Surely, surely, it poked, and it prodded, even her.

She watched the cabinet door with every fiber of concentration she could muster, and she did not let herself look away.

Except, then James Holden said, “Good. I couldn’t bring myself to…He’d be glad to know it didn’t go bad.”

The relief in his voice, his sigh, the subtle drop of his shoulders, was nearly tangible. Clarissa did not speak. Not even when James Holden crossed the room with all the ease of someone wholly unaware of the life and the future they held in their hands. Clarissa did not move, but when Holden lowered himself into the seat opposite her at the table, she finally allowed herself to look.

It was the calm in his voice that fought away the fear in the end. At first, she said nothing and let him chat through the quiet, but there was something to the way he spoke that made it hard to keep him waiting very long. Wrong choices and wronger words somehow became right in his hands. She was easing back into her seat before she realized.

 _So, a jailbreak, huh,_ he asked, and she explained.

 _Baltimore,_ and she explained more.

 _Winnipesaukee; the staff; Luna,_ and she explained, and explained, and explained until there wasn’t anything left but the things that mattered most. He didn’t seem to care to hear them, and so she didn’t care to speak them to life. It didn’t feel safe to push. To give up too much, too fast.

It didn’t occur to her until much later that pushing was how she grew so quickly to be someone Amos considered family.

It didn’t occur to her to wonder until much later than even that how both she and the famous captain of a famously stolen Martian warship could come to the same very incorrect conclusion that there was a science to working through tension with people you had tried to kill.

In that moment however, it didn’t occur to her, and it certainly didn’t occur to him.

So, she tried, in that avoidance, to sound intelligent, and competent, and like someone worth keeping around, but she failed phenomenally at all three. Because James Holden listened to her like he actually cared to know the logistics behind how they survived the rocks, and the journey, and the shootout, and even the details behind the repair work on that old, mothballed yacht.

She tried, and she tried, but she tripped over herself the entire way, babbling to fill up the silence where he refused, and she heard the stutters, and the sentences wrought into circles, but she heard them too late. Too far gone to pull back by the time she recognized the sounds. Too far distracted by the way James Holden — _just_ Holden, he offered with a goofy little smile every time she slipped — watched her like something permanent.

It was that realization more than his latest question that pushed her somewhere dangerous.

“If you’d like,” Holden asked like a statement; like an offer; like an olive branch she didn’t deserve. “We can put out some feelers. See if anyone knows anyone who might be able to help you with those mods.”

Something sat in the deepest depths of Clarissa’s heart frayed to snapped. Because she could never. Her slow death was atonement for things he would never understand. Never mind that the words, _I don’t care, all of it has to mean something, otherwise all these people have died for nothing,_ still echoed in the back of her mind every second she spent alone on that ship. Never mind that his caring enough to listen couldn’t have meant anything other than caring enough to understand. Never mind all of it.

A snarl built with enough force that even the small, dangerous something that had spurred it to life recoiled in shock. It pushed her forward and then pulled her back, starting, and stumbling, and turning over again like a right-side-wrong buffer fading all the thought in her mind ten shades dirtier into the sludge of white noise.

Holden knew enough of her anger for ten lifetimes, so in the end, she said nothing at all. In the end, she was fallen whole lightyears away to depths of absence beyond consideration. There and then not. Standing on a cliff, toes cresting over the edge, glued to the surface by nothing more than the bone-deep fear of _everything._

Her body spared Holden a long glance, studying him carefully. He tried to take another sip of his coffee, but the mug was long since empty, and so he brought it to still-enough, just above the table, and waited in silence.

Her mind looked again to the cliff, and to the abyss waiting below.

In the end, she said nothing. But in the after, she pushed. She leapt into that chasm. She explained.


End file.
